National Life and Character 317 



live in communities where the native American 

 element is largest and where there is least inequality 

 of conditions, know well that there is no reason 

 whatever in the nature of things why, in the future, 

 communities should not spring up where there shall 

 be no great extremes of poverty and wealth, and 

 where, nevertheless, the power of civilization and 

 the chances for happiness and for doing good work 

 shall be greater than ever before. 



As to what Mr. Pearson says about the work of 

 the world which is best worth doing being now done, 

 the facts do not bear him out. He thinks that the 

 great poems have all been written, that the days 

 of the drama and the epic are past. Yet one of the 

 greatest plays that has ever been produced, always 

 excepting the plays of Shakespeare, was produced 

 in this century ; and if the world had to wait nearly 

 two thousand years after the vanishing of the Athe- 

 nian dramatists before Shakespeare appeared, and 

 two hundred years more before Goethe wrote his one 

 great play, we can well afford to suspend judgment 

 for a few hundred years at least, before asserting 

 that no country and no language will again produce 

 another great drama. So it is with the epic. We 

 are too near Milton, who came three thousand years 

 after Homer, to assert that the centuries to come 

 will never more see an epic. One race may grow 

 feeble and decrepit and be unable to do any more 

 work ; but another may take its place. After a time 

 the Greek and Latin writers found that they had no 

 more to say; and a critic belonging to either na- 



